Battle of Suomussalmi

The Battle of Suomussalmi was a battle fought between Finnish and Soviet forces in the Winter War. The action took place from around December 7, 1939 to January 8, 1940. The outcome was a Finnish victory against superior forces. Suomussalmi is considered the clearest, most important, and most significant Finnish victory in the northern half of Finland. In Finland, the battle is still seen today as a symbol of the entire Winter War itself.

Course of battle

On November 30, 1939, the Soviet 163rd division crossed the border between Finland and the Soviet Union and advanced from the north-east towards the village of Suomussalmi. The Soviet objective was to advance to the city of Oulu, effectively cutting Finland in half. This sector had only one Finnish battalion (Er.P 15), which was placed near Raate, outside Suomussalmi.

Suomussalmi was taken with little resistance on December 7 (only two incomplete companies of covering forces led a holding action between the border and Suomussalmi), but the Finns destroyed the village before this, to deny the Soviets shelter, and withdrew to the opposite shore of lakes Niskanselkä and Haukiperä.

Suomussalmi

Suomussalmi (Russian: Суомуссалми) is a municipality in Finland and is located in the Kainuu region. The municipality has a population of 8,445 (30 June 2015) and covers an area of 5,857.59 square kilometres (2,261.63 sq mi) of which 587.03 km² (226.65 sq mi) is water. The population density is 1.6 inhabitants per square kilometre (4.1/sq mi). The municipality is unilingually Finnish. Ämmänsaari is the biggest built-up area in the municipality.

Suomussalmi is the second southernmost part of the reindeer-herding area in Finland.

During the Winter War of 1939–40, several battles were fought in the area around Suomussalmi, the most important ones being the Battle of Suomussalmi and the Battle of Raate. In these battles Finnish forces defeated numerically superior Soviet forces.

Formula One racing driver Heikki Kovalainen is from Suomussalmi, as well as the author Ilmari Kianto and the composer Osmo Tapio Räihälä, in addition to the ice hockey player, Janne Pesonen.

Politics

Results of the Finnish parliamentary election, 2011 in Suomussalmi:

Winter War

The Winter War (Finnish: Talvisota, Swedish: Vinterkriget, Norwegian: Vinterkrigen, Russian: Зи́мняя война́, tr. Zimnyaya voyna) was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939–1940. It began with the Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 (three months after the outbreak of World War II), and ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the League on 14 December 1939.

The Soviet Union ostensibly sought to claim parts of Finnish territory, demanding—amongst other concessions—that Finland cede substantial border territories in exchange for land elsewhere, claiming security reasons, primarily the protection of Leningrad, which was only 32 km (20 mi) from the Finnish border. Finland refused and the USSR invaded the country. Many sources conclude that the Soviet Union had intended to conquer all of Finland, and use the establishment of the puppet Finnish Communist government and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols as proof of this, while other sources argue against this idea of a full Soviet conquest.

Order of battle

In modern use, the order of battle of an armed force participating in a military operation or campaign shows the hierarchical organization, command structure, strength, disposition of personnel, and equipment of units and formations of the armed force. Various abbreviations are in use, including OOB, O/B, or OB, while ORBAT remains the most common in the United Kingdom. An order of battle should be distinguished from a table of organisation, which is the intended composition of a given unit or formation according to the military doctrine of its armed force. As combat operations develop during a campaign, orders of battle may be revised and altered in response to the military needs and challenges. Also the known details of an order of battle may change during the course of executing the commanders' after action reports and/or other accounting methods (e.g. despatches) as combat assessment is conducted.

Historical approaches

In its original form during the Medieval period of European warfare, an order of battle was the order in which troops were positioned relative to the position of the army commander. The term was also applied to the disposition of ships in the line of battle during the age of sail. In the later transformation of its meaning during the European period of Early Modern warfare the order of battle came to mean the order in which the units manoeuvered or deployed onto the battlefield to form battle-lines, with the positioning on the right considered the place of greatest honour. This need to reflect the unit seniority led to the keeping of military staff records, in tabular form reflecting the compilation of units an army, their commanders, equipment, and locations on the battlefield.

Big O notation

In mathematics, big O notation describes the limiting behavior of a function when the argument tends towards a particular value or infinity, usually in terms of simpler functions. It is a member of a larger family of notations that is called Landau notation, Bachmann–Landau notation (after Edmund Landau and Paul Bachmann), or asymptotic notation. In computer science, big O notation is used to classify algorithms by how they respond (e.g., in their processing time or working space requirements) to changes in input size. In analytic number theory, it is used to estimate the "error committed" while replacing the asymptotic size, or asymptotic mean size, of an arithmetical function, by the value, or mean value, it takes at a large finite argument. A famous example is the problem of estimating the remainder term in the prime number theorem.

Big O notation characterizes functions according to their growth rates: different functions with the same growth rate may be represented using the same O notation.